


invisible machinery

by lackingsoy



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Foreshadowing, Found Family, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Past Abuse, Pre-Canon, Pre-OT3, Soulmates, Trauma, bc fuck sakavic, riko can die, to the book 3 chokehold scene bc im. salty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 10:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25967884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: Andrew drags his mouth southward and doesn’t bother with apologizing for imagined horrors or future ones. Doesn’t bother to say,I won't, I couldn’t, I would never do something like that to you.Can't promise it.Months before Neil arrives at PSU, Kevin has a nightmare. Andrew questions him.
Relationships: Kevin Day & Andrew Minyard, Kevin Day & Riko Moriyama, Kevin Day/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 9
Kudos: 65





	invisible machinery

**Author's Note:**

> a smattering of thanks for essence29 on tumblr for beta-reading this!

It starts like this: hot, wet hands crawling up his skin.

He can't see a thing except for the gleam of white teeth, bared in a smile as a smear for a face stares down at him. Crooked fingers reach the base of his throat, hooking slightly over his collarbone. It's not sweat on those hands, Kevin knows. But there is no red. Yet.

Kevin can't say a word as Riko bends him in half, pushing him down, down, down, into the black of Evermore, against the narrow walls of their shared dorm room. Jean isn't behind them this time, hovering like an apparition out of the woods, just watching, pale and grey and unmoving.

Short nails trail across the notch of his neck and hold, thin pressure point and minor mercies, before digging inward. Kevin makes the first noise of distress, the particular kind that he knows that Riko enjoys. Riko's fingers keep pressing, pushing, pressuring, as if to rub out the heart and pulse of him.

"Stop," Kevin's voice is strangled, shoved out of him from the very tips of Riko's hold. He's never spoken out against Riko before, not ever and certainly not like this. But this is a dream; just a watered-down rendition of his actual memories, and he knows this because the faceless figure actually pauses, actually lets up, even if only a little, and allows Kevin to suck in a reedy breath.

"Riko," Kevin gasps. "Stop this. Please."

The gleam darts back. The face, missing definition before, now begins to clear: bold lines for eyebrows and skin rapidly gaining color, red to pink to white, the evolution emerging like monsters do from the dark.

"You know I hate that word, Kevin," Andrew's face and voice and mouth say, lips split in Riko's terrible smile, and brings down his--Riko's, Kevin thinks, desperate: it has to be--hands on the thick of Kevin's neck.

Air instantly leaves him, squeezed out of him in one neat motion. Kevin claws at Andrew's wrists and wristbands, the fabric black and familiar and _Andrew's_.

A dream, Kevin thinks, feverish, delirious. He can no longer speak, a monster with Andrew's face and Riko's savagery leaning downward to press his forehead tentatively against his. Like he had done a few times before, when Kevin was coming out of the throes of a panic attack or when he was about to-

Kiss him.

This Andrew doesn't. This Andrew laughs at the despair in his face, a sane little giggle flushed white with the promise of demise, and strangles Kevin harder.

It’s the blistering heat that yanks him out of the violent sleep.

That, or the impression of a chokehold, smothering him, so real that his brain had grasped for the ABORT mechanism.

His closed throat makes his chest heave and stomach spasm, breath leaking out of him in loud staggered gasps. For a second Kevin can't even make out the shaky outlines of his hands. He feels the noose of familiar fingers around his throat like burned-off calluses: a scar being abruptly shaped into being like the one stretched nascent and barely healed across the bone of his left hand. 

He wants to cry. Or vomit. He can't decide which so he sits there, hunched over in his single-minded indecision, sweat sticking his t-shirt to the back of his arms, until the minute shifting of the mattress next to him forces its way into the drone in his ears.

"Kevin," as if straight from his dreams. Andrew's bored monotone, the discernible lack of sympathy almost the exact same. 

His Andrew. The one who is supposed to protect him from his past and demons and loose ends. The one who had sworn himself to Kevin's safety, and has become, in some preciously futile ways, responsible for tethering Kevin as if an anchor or island in the midst of a great blue storm. But then again--Kevin supposes Andrew is responsible for many things. It'd be easy to lose track of them.

(Then again, Kevin had always been good at making excuses for his own abuse.)

Kevin lifts his head in a slow, exaggerated movement and stares his doom in the face.

Through the haze leaking out of the drawn windows, Andrew’s ridged cheekbones emerge paled and rimmed grey. Like smoke, but there is no cigarette in sight.

“Riko?” Andrew says. 

Kevin pushes down the nausea. “No,” he manages, sounding like he's swallowed a drought. “It was--” _You_ , he doesn't say. Can't bring himself to, for it may break whatever holds them together, whatever ties Kevin to this hopeless place of a home where his father lives and breathes. At PSU as a new history transfer or assistant coach on Palmetto's rundown court, trying to shape its shitty team into something presentable. Powerful. Maybe powerful enough to-

Riko's laughter has never left him. He hears it now, pressed up against the back of his mind like a palm print, clear as fucking day. 

Andrew doesn't reply, but a quiet flame goes up in the dulled darkness, illuminating his impassive face. Kevin sees the ember cast off ash, a meager flick of fire, then nothing.

"If it wasn't Riko who put that miserable look on your face," Andrew says, saying it like he knows exactly what Kevin refrained from revealing, and takes that exact moment to take an exceedingly long pull. Smoke from his mouth mixes with the sleepy gaze from the streetlamp outside their dorm window, morphing into a vast wave and obscuring his form. 

Finally, though: "Was it me?"

The memory of Riko's laugh shutters. Kevin thinks that that is hardly appropriate, or accurate, but his mind goes very, very quiet, and what's left is the pulse of his blood, rushing out of his face.

"Yes or no," Andrew's voice sounds as flat as it's always been, unaffected and uncaring. 

Kevin almost wants to say that it's Okay. That it's Fine, that it had been nothing at all; just his trauma taking friendly faces and wreaking its usual havoc upon them. But he has only ever had limited options, and right now he had no room to negotiate, to redirect, to lie, to salvage either of their scarred skins.

Leave them out to flay, like this: "Yes," he says, and there's no sharp intake of breath, no jostling of sheets, no narrowed eyes in surprise. There's no movement or sound--nothing. Stillness sits on Andrew like blinds on windows, lotus pads on unscathed water. Kevin doesn't breathe, the thing sunk down somewhere in his chest, and it seems only just.

"What did I do?" Andrew's voice says, which in their measured silence had broken down into a whispery rasp, lower than it was flat. Not quite as unaffected as it had been before. He sounds somehow as if the knowledge of him strangling Kevin with his bare hands is old news, and he is merely receiving it a year in advance. 

A prophecy that had eaten its own tail. The omen of the one-headed coin.

When Kevin doesn't speak, Andrew's voice grows a modicum louder. Sharper. Taking on the barest hint of one of those blades he keeps pressed against the mutilated skin of his forearm: "Tell. Me."

"It was just a dream." Kevin whispers, like saying so might convince him that it will stay that way--something feverish and sick and stupid, dredged up from the horrors of his mind, past, and imagination. Like saying so would talk down whatever stream of self-loathing that had begun its fervor anew in the pit of Andrew's mind.

"Doesn't matter," Andrew must've put out the cigarette. Kevin can't smell the fresh pang of nicotine anymore. "I was in that dream of yours, and I put that look on your face. It was my hands that held you down and it was my face that you saw.

"Am I wrong."

Kevin wants, distantly, to run from this room and sprint into the Arizona desert, let the sun there burn him out of his skin. "It wasn't like that," he says instead.

A scoff, small and sharp like a jagged rock, is tossed in his direction. Kevin feels it against his face like the butt of a racquet. Or the Master's cane.

"Don't be soft, Day. I'm not going to talk about my feelings with you and you sure as hell won't be protecting me from anything. That's my job, remember?"

 _Yes,_ Kevin wants to snap. _I fucking know. I know it the same way I know Riko's hand twitches twice before he backhands somebody. I know it the way I know your entire arm trembles when you reach for your knives fresh out of sleep. I know it the way I have a million times before, locked into a place that had no care or love for a newly motherless child._

"I know." Kevin lets out a noise that's supposed to be a laugh but doesn't quite make it. It launches out of his mouth like a half-backed insult. "I fucking _know,_ Andrew."

“Then quit dilly-dallying." Kevin can imagine Andrew's rolled back eyes like they always are on early Sunday mornings, when Kevin grasps lazily for his phone's alarm and fails pathetically to shut it off, only to have Andrew do it for him. The words sound as close to a taunt as they could be as a bald request, and for a moment that understanding brings Kevin a shivering semblance of relief. Andrew sounds as he normally does: haunty and vaguely amused and entirely unimpressed and--

Kevin understands, suddenly and with the force of a broken dam.

He’s angry.

Angry for Kevin. Angry at himself in his particular, self-exacting way. The coating of it livid and oppressive and heavy-heeled, and almost certainly the kind that snakes have to eat out of during molting season.

“We don’t have to do this,” Kevin says, because he has to give him an out. Because Andrew could swear his life away on a penny. Take it, Kevin thinks, and it’s not even the selfishness of not wanting to pry open old wounds and make new ones that bleeds desperation all over him.

 _Take it_ , even though Kevin knows in his soul that the boy before him will not. Out of principle or spite or some fundamental vindication, but by the Lord Andrew Minyard will not.

And he doesn’t. Andrew takes it and runs it into the ground and sets off the entire goddamn minefield: “Do I have to choke it out of you, Kevin?”

Something watery and exhausting (explosive) loosens from his mouth, the sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “You were,” Kevin says. “Choking me. Like this,” a mimicry of Andrew’s hands in the span of his, scar and bone pink and grave-white, spread over the column of his neck. He even presses down, as if to relive it or relieve it from existence, the pressure enlightening. One of his wrists is almost immediately thrown off, palm catching halos before colliding with the mattress. 

The other is clenched in Andrew’s fist, held up in the gray light like the glint of a naked knife.

“You and your stupid fucking demonstrations,” hisses Andrew, so annoyed and royally emotive that Kevin can’t help tipping his head back and letting out a real laugh, raw and high. Andrew just shakes his arm and the rest of Kevin by extension, the action doing nothing to curb his laughter and actually elongating it by an additional six seconds.

“Are you done?” Andrew says when Kevin finally stops shuddering. His eyes are wet. Andrew still hasn’t let go of his wrist. 

“Yeah,” Kevin says, not bothering to lift his head. His neck is perfectly bared, the line of his throat a steady crest in the night, and Kevin closes his eyes. It would be fine, he thinks, if one day after a hundred or a thousand days of leaving himself exposed to Andrew, that he turns on him suddenly and with a vengeance. 

It would be fine, Kevin promises to the tiny child in his chest, already shuddering with the force of his sobs.

“Kevin,” Andrew’s voice is tight, violin strings wound and ready to snap. “Yes or no.”

“It’s fine,” Kevin repeats, more to himself than anyone else. Andrew’s thumb presses a little harder into the bone of his wrist.

“Yes, or no.”

Kevin doesn’t open his eyes, feeling the shadow of Andrew spread over him like a leftover pyre. He doesn’t move. The corner of his mouth lifts a little. “Yes.” 

A long minute; a breath that sounds chipped off the edge of a cliff. Then: the faintest graze of lips on the skin of Kevin’s throat, dry and chapped and--gentle. So gentle. Gentle like Kevin has never dared to imagine. 

Andrew drags his mouth southward and doesn’t bother with apologizing for imagined horrors or future ones. Doesn’t bother to say, _I won't, I couldn’t, I would never do something like that to you._ Can't promise it. 

They both know very well that Andrew has always been capable of great violence, and so long as that capability exists--no matter how slight or diminished it is by their deal--so did the possibility of him laying a hand on Kevin. 

This chance of Andrew’s fingers locked around Kevin’s throat. But also: the pressure of Andrew’s mouth, set adrift across Kevin’s neck like a raft out at sea, in the peak of night. Andrew sucks a small wet thing into being at the base of his throat, and Kevin can’t swallow the groan. Something hot spills out of his eyes.

Andrew’s head lifts; his eyes are at half-mast, two blue flints pinned on Kevin’s face. If Kevin wants to, he could almost make out sparks--thrown out from the ice there like flotsam and debris, rising from the dark waters and into significance like titans. 

Neither of them speaks. Neither of them says that they will find it in themselves and in each other to be alright eventually. They are not soft--the world does not allow them to be. Their voices are tiny, precious things used only when the balance between them is not so deadly or so heavy or so damned breakable.

But there is Andrew, skating a silent palm over Kevin’s cheekbone where the number _2_ is curved along his dark skin. He smears a thumb over it, damp and hot.

“Sleep,” he says, and Kevin eventually frees the exhaustion buried in the marrow of his knuckles just enough to comply. The only mercy as he drifts slowly out of consciousness is the whisper of Andrew's hand, smoothing down his nape.

**Author's Note:**

> gonna die mad abt sakavic throwing kevin's arc to the wayside. bye


End file.
